(WWJ) Health officials are warning people not to look at Monday's solar eclipse with the bare eye.
But why? What could really happen?
WWJ's Taylor Dietz spoke with Henry Ford Ophthalmologist Dr. Nitin Kumar who said, in general, looking at the sun is really, really bad for your eyes.
"The front of the eye is a focusing system that focuses light onto the retina in the back of the eye," Kumar explained, in an interview Wednesday.
"And that focusing system does a really great job of making sure that we can see things in focus. We have glasses if we need additional focus.
"Now, when you look at the sun, what happens is it focuses all of the light from the sun, including a lot of harmful rays, directly onto the retina that will cause thermal damage to the cells that do the actual seeing, which are called photoreceptors. That thermal damage is for the most part permanent. Therefore, it's really, really bad to look at the sun," Kumar said.
Kumar acknowledged that most people don't make a habit of looking at the sun in their day to day life. But, when something like the eclipse happens, everyone's curious, and everyone wants to check it out.
"And there's a prevailing thought that, you know, 'I'm just gonna take a quick peek.' And if it's a short enough peak, you may be OK," the doctor said. "But any real exposure to the sun can cause damage to your retina, and any sustained exposure for more than a few seconds can almost certainly cause some amount of damage."
"Therefore, it's really, really, really bad to look at the sun without any protection, and you shouldn't do it," he stressed.
So, is there any difference between looking at the sun like on a normal day, and looking at it during an eclipse?
"For the most part, no," Kumar told Dietz. "The eclipse, when it reaches totality, can be looked at — because you're not looking at the sun directly."
"Now, in the Detroit Metro area, we for the most part are not in totality.
So we will always be getting rays from the sunlight from the sun coming to us. Even though we're at 95 or 96% of an eclipse, you're still getting light from the sun directly coming toward you.
"And so, because of that, looking at the sun — whether it's during an eclipse or not during an eclipse — is really, really bad for you."
Even for those who will be looking at the eclipse within the path of totality, Kumar still urges caution, as timing is a concern.
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"When you're going to look to the exact moment of totality and making sure you look away as soon as totality is gone, is not that easy to do," he said.
"You got to kind of look a couple of times to make sure you're at totality and then you got to make sure that you're good enough to look away immediately."
"So again," Kumar stressed, "looking at the sun during an eclipse, or not during an eclipse is really bad without proper eye protection."
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